Collaboration and file sharing is becoming easier as collaboration software improves. However, not every device can support co-authoring and collaboration. Some devices are not collaboration-ready or require all systems accessing and modifying the digital content to be running a same program. The ability of a person to access, share, and co-author digital content can depend, in part, on whether the person has the appropriate software program that recognizes the format of the digital content and a device that can execute the program so that the digital content can be viewed, modified and have those modifications propagated and reflected as being part of the digital content when accessed by another person (or the same person on another platform).
With the proliferation of devices using different platforms, it can be a challenge to share, access, and edit content of one format with a device running a program capable of only accessing and displaying a different format or capable of only editing the content with an earlier version of a feature. In addition, as new features are added to new versions of certain applications, the new versions must support backwards compatibility and/or have extensibility built in to support future versions.